The Work of Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Cambridge Library Collection, Vol. 1)

The Renaissance

The Renaissance (Classic Reprint)

The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Dover Fine Art, History of Art)

The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

The Renaissance

This etext was prepared by Bruce McClintock,email brucemcc@cygnus.uwa.edu.au

THE RENAISSANCESTUDIES IN ART AND POETRYby Walter Pater

Sixth Edition

DedicationTo C.L.S.

PREFACE

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to definebeauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to finda universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most oftenbeen in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Suchdiscussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in artor poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is lessexcellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry,with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, likeall other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and thedefinition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to itsabstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in themost concrete terms possible, to find, not a universal formula for it,but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that specialmanifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.

"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said tobe the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticismthe first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to knowone's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise itdistinctly. The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals--music,poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life--are indeedreceptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the productsof nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture,this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to ME? Whateffect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and ifso, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by itspresence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions arethe original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as inthe study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primarydata for oneself, or not at all. And he who experiences theseimpressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination andanalysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstractquestion what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truthor experience--metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysicalquestions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable ornot, of no interest to him.

The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has todo, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, aspowers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more orless peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes toexplain, analysing it and reducing it to its elements. To him, thepicture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book,La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara, Pico of Mirandola, are valuable fortheir virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, a wine, a gem; for theproperty each has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impressionof pleasure. Our education becomes complete in proportion as oursusceptibility to these impressions increases in depth and variety. Andthe function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, analyse, andseparate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape,a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this specialimpression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of thatimpression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. His end isreached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemistnotes some natural element, for himself and others; and the rule forthose who would reach this end is stated with great exactness in thewords of a recent critic of Sainte-Beuve:--De se borner a connaitre depres les belles choses, et a s'en nourrir en exquis amateurs, enhumanistes accomplis.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correctabstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind oftemperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence ofbeautiful objects. He will remember always that beauty exists in manyforms. To him all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselvesequal. In all ages there have been some excellent workmen, and someexcellent work done. The question he asks is always:--In whom did thestir, the genius, the sentiment of the period find itself? where was thereceptacle of its refinement, its elevation, its taste? "The ages areall equal," says William Blake, "but genius is always above its age."

Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from thecommoner elements with which it may be found in combination. Fewartists, not Goethe or Byron even, work quite cleanly, casting off alldebris, and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination haswholly fused and transformed. Take, for instance, the writings ofWordsworth. The heat of his genius, entering into the substance of hiswork, has crystallised a part, but only a part, of it; and in that greatmass of verse there is much which might well be forgotten. But scatteredup and down it, sometimes fusing and transforming entire compositions,like the Stanzas on Resolution and Independence, and the Ode on theRecollections of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random, depositing afine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly searchthrough and transform, we trace the action of his unique, incommunicablefaculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things, andof man's life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour andcharacter from local influences, from the hills and streams, and fromnatural sights and sounds. Well! that is the virtue, the activeprinciple in Wordsworth's poetry; and then the function of the critic ofWordsworth is to follow up that active principle, to disengage it, tomark the degree in which it penetrates his verse.

The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history of theRenaissance, and touch what I think are the chief points in thatcomplex, many-sided movement. I have explained in the first of them whatI understand by the word, giving it a much wider scope than wasintended by those who originally used it to denote only that revival ofclassical antiquity in the fifteenth century which was but one of manyresults of a general excitement and enlightening of the human mind, ofwhich the great aim and achievements of what, as Christian art, is oftenfalsely opposed to the Renaissance, were another result. This outbreakof the human spirit may be traced far into the middle age itself, withits qualities already clearly pronounced, the care for physical beauty,the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which thereligious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and theimagination. I have taken as an example of this movement, this earlierRenaissance within the middle age itself, and as an expression of itsqualities, two little compositions in early French; not because theyconstitute the best possible expression of them, but because they helpthe unity of my series, inasmuch as the Renaissance ends also in France,in French poetry, in a phase of which the writings of Joachim du Bellayare in many ways the most perfect illustration; the Renaissance thusputting forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, theproducts of which have to the full that subtle and delicate sweetnesswhich belongs to a refined and comely decadence; just as its earliestphases have the freshness which belongs to all periods of growth in art,the charm of ascesis, of the austere and serious girding of the loins inyouth.

But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of theRenaissance mainly lies,--in that solemn fifteenth century which canhardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in thethings of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art,its special and prominent personalities, with their profound aestheticcharm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethicalqualities of which it is a consummate type.

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up theculture of an age, move for the most part from differentstarting-points, and by unconnected roads. As products of the samegeneration they partake indeed of a common character, and unconsciouslyillustrate each other; but of the producers themselves, each group issolitary, gaining what advantage or disadvantage there may be inintellectual isolation. Art and poetry, philosophy and the religiouslife, and that other life of refined pleasure and action in the openplaces of the world, are each of them confined to its own circle ofideas, and those who prosecute either of them are generally littlecurious of the thoughts of others. There come, however, from time totime, eras of more favourable conditions, in which the thoughts of mendraw nearer together than is their wont, and the many interests of theintellectual world combine in one complete type of general culture. Thefifteenth century in Italy is one of these happier eras; and what issometimes said of the age of Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo:--it isan age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralised, complete.Here, artists and philosophers and those whom the action of the worldhas elevated and made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe acommon air, and catch light and heat from each other's thoughts. Thereis a spirit of general elevation and enlightenment in which all alikecommunicate. It is the unity of this spirit which gives unity to all thevarious products of the Renaissance; and it is to this intimate alliancewith mind, this participation in the best thoughts which that ageproduced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth century owes much ofits grave dignity and influence.

I have added an essay on Winckelmann, as not incongruous with thestudies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in the eighteenthcentury, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasmfor the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake,by his Hellenism, his life-long struggle to attain to the Greek spirit,he is in sympathy with the humanists of an earlier century. He is thelast fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motiveand tendencies.

CONTENTS

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA

SANDRO BOTTICELLI

LUCA DELLA ROBBIA

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO

LEONARDO DA VINCI

THE SCHOOL OF GIORGIONE

JOACHIM DU BELLAY

WINCKELMANN

CONCLUSION

TWO EARLY FRENCH STORIES

The history of the Renaissance ends in France, and carries us away fromItaly to the beautiful cities of the country of the Loire. But it was inFrance also, in a very important sense, that the Renaissance had begun;and French writers, who are so fond of connecting the creations ofItalian genius with a French origin, who tell us how Francis of Assisitook not his name only, but all those notions of chivalry and romanticlove which so deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French source, howBoccaccio borrowed the outlines of his stories from the old Frenchfabliaux, and how Dante himself expressly connects the origin of the artof miniature-painting with the city of Paris, have often dwelt on thisnotion of a Renaissance in the end of the twelfth and the beginning ofthe thirteenth century, a Renaissance within the limits of the middleage itself--a brilliant, but in part abortive effort to do for humanlife and the human mind what was afterwards done in the fifteenth. Theword Renaissance, indeed, is now generally used to denote not merelythat revival of classical antiquity which took place in the fifteenthcentury, and to which the word was first applied, but a whole complexmovement, of which that revival of classical antiquity was but oneelement or symptom. For us the Renaissance is the name of a many-sidedbut yet united movement, in which the love of the things of theintellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a moreliberal and comely way of conceiving life, make themselves felt, urgingthose who experience this desire to search out first one and thenanother means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and directingthem not merely to the discovery of old and forgotten sources of thisenjoyment, but to the divination of fresh sources thereof--newexperiences, new subjects of poetry, new forms of art. Of such feelingthere was a great outbreak in the end of the twelfth and the beginningof the following century. Here and there, under rare and happyconditions, in Pointed architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love,in the poetry of Provence, the rude strength of the middle age turns tosweetness; and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seedof the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to seek afterthe springs of perfect sweetness in the Hellenic world. And coming aftera long period in which this instinct had been crushed, that true "darkage," in which so many sources of intellectual and imaginative enjoymenthad actually disappeared, this outbreak is rightly called a Renaissance,a revival.

Theories which bring into connexion with each other modes of thought andfeeling, periods of taste, forms of art and poetry, which the narrownessof men's minds constantly tends to oppose to each other, have a greatstimulus for the intellect, and are almost always worth understanding.It is so with this theory of a Renaissance within the middle age, whichseeks to establish a continuity between the most characteristic work ofthe middle age, the sculpture of Chartres and the windows of Le Mans,and the work of the later Renaissance, the work of Jean Cousin andGermain Pilon, and thus heals that rupture between the middle age andthe Renaissance which has so often been exaggerated. But it is not somuch the ecclesiastical art of the middle age, its sculpture andpainting--work certainly done in a great measure for pleasure's sake, inwhich even a secular, a rebellious spirit often betrays itself--butrather the profane poetry of the middle age, the poetry of Provence, andthe magnificent after-growth of that poetry in Italy and France, whichthose French writers have in view, when they speak of this Renaissancewithin the middle age. In that poetry, earthly passion, with itsintimacy, its freedom, its variety--the liberty of the heart--makesitself felt; and the name of Abelard, the great clerk and the greatlover, connects the expression of this liberty of heart with the freeplay of human intelligence around all subjects presented to it, with theliberty of the intellect, as that age understood it. Every one knows thelegend of Abelard, a legend hardly less passionate, certainly not lesscharacteristic of the middle age, than the legend of Tannhaeuser; howthe famous and comely clerk, in whom Wisdom herself, self-possessed,pleasant, and discreet, seemed to sit enthroned, came to live in thehouse of a canon of the church of Notre-Dame, where dwelt a girlHeloise, believed to be the old priest's orphan niece, his love for whomhe had testified by giving her an education then unrivalled, so thatrumour even asserted that, through the knowledge of languages, enablingher to penetrate into the mysteries of the older world, she had become asorceress, like the Celtic druidesses; and how as Abelard and Heloisesat together at home there, to refine a little further on the nature ofabstract ideas, "Love made himself of the party with them." You conceivethe temptations of the scholar, who, in such dreamy tranquillity, amidthe bright and busy spectacle of the "Island," lived in a world ofsomething like shadows; and that for one who knew so well how to assignits exact value to every abstract idea, those restraints which lie onthe consciences of other men had been relaxed. It appears that hecomposed many verses in the vulgar tongue: already the young men sangthem on the quay below the house. Those songs, says M. de Remusat, wereprobably in the taste of the Trouveres, of whom he was one of the firstin date, or, so to speak, the predecessor. It is the same spirit whichhas moulded the famous "letters," written in the quaint Latin of themiddle age. At the foot of that early Gothic tower, which the nextgeneration raised to grace the precincts of Abelard's school, on the"Mountain of Saint Genevieve," the historian Michelet sees in thought "aterrible assembly; not the hearers of Abelard alone, fifty bishops,twenty cardinals, two popes, the whole body of scholastic philosophy;not only the learned Heloise, the teaching of languages, and theRenaissance; but Arnold of Brescia--that is to say, the revolution." Andso from the rooms of this shadowy house by the Seine side we see thatspirit going abroad, with its qualities already well defined, itsintimacy, its languid sweetness, its rebellion, its subtle skill individing the elements of human passion, its care for physical beauty,its worship of the body, which penetrated the early literature of Italy,and finds an echo in Dante.

That Abelard is not mentioned in the Divine Comedy may appear a singularomission to the reader of Dante, who seems to have inwoven into thetexture of his work whatever had impressed him as either effective incolour or spiritually significant among the recorded incidents of actuallife. Nowhere in his great poem do we find the name, nor so much as anallusion to the story of one who had left so deep a mark on thephilosophy of which Dante was an eager student, of whom in the LatinQuarter, and from the lips of scholar or teacher in the University ofParis, during his sojourn among them, he can hardly have failed to hear.We can only suppose that he had indeed considered the story and the man,and had abstained from passing judgment as to his place in the schemeof "eternal justice." In the famous legend of Tannhaeuser, the erringknight makes his way to Rome, to seek absolution at what was then thecentre of Christian religion. "So soon," thought and said the Pope, "asthe staff in his hand should bud and blossom, so soon might the soul ofTannhaeuser be saved, and no sooner; and it came to pass not long afterthat the dry wood of a staff which the Pope had carried in his hand wascovered with leaves and flowers." So, in the cloister of Godstow apetrified tree was shown, of which the nuns told that the fair Rosamond,who had died among them, had declared that, the tree being then aliveand green, it would be changed into stone at the hour of her salvation.When Abelard died, like Tannhaeuser, he was on his way to Rome: whatmight have happened had he reached his journey's end is uncertain; andit is in this uncertain twilight that his relation to the generalbeliefs of his age has always remained. In this, as in other things, heprefigures the character of the Renaissance, that movement in which, invarious ways, the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feelingand sensation and thought, not opposed to, but only beyond andindependent of the spiritual system then actually realised. Theopposition into which Abelard is thrown, which gives its colour to hiscareer, which breaks his soul to pieces, is a no less subtle oppositionthan that between the merely professional, official, hireling ministersof that system, with their ignorant worship of system for its own sake,and the true child of light, the humanist, with reason and heart andsenses quick, while theirs were almost dead. He reaches out towards, heattains, modes of ideal living, beyond the prescribed limits of thatsystem, though possibly contained in essential germ within it. As alwayshappens, the adherents of the poorer and narrower culture had nosympathy with, because no understanding of, a culture richer and moreample than their own: after the discovery of wheat they would still liveupon acorns--apres l'invention du ble ils voulaient encore vivre dugland; and would hear of no service to the higher needs of humanity withinstruments not of their forging.

But the human spirit, bold through those needs, was too strong for them.Abelard and Heloise write their letters--letters with a wonderfuloutpouring of soul--in medieval Latin; and Abelard, though he composessongs in the vulgar tongue, writes also in Latin those treatises inwhich he tries to find a ground of reality below the abstractions ofphilosophy, as one bent on trying all things by their congruity withhuman experience, who had felt the hand of Heloise, and looked into hereyes, and tested the resources of humanity in her great and energeticnature. Yet it is only a little later, early in the thirteenth century,that French prose romance begins; and in one of the pretty volumes ofthe Bibliotheque Elzevirienne some of the most striking fragments of itmay be found, edited with much intelligence. In one of thesethirteenth-century stories, Li Amitiez de Ami et Amile, that free playof human affection, of the claims of which Abelard's story is anassertion, makes itself felt in the incidents of a great friendship, afriendship pure and generous, pushed to a sort of passionate exaltation,and more than faithful unto death. Such comradeship, though instances ofit are to be found everywhere, is still especially a classical motive;Chaucer expressing the sentiment of it so strongly in an antique tale,that one knows not whether the love of both Palamon and Arcite forEmelya, or of those two for each other, is the chiefer subject of theKnight's Tale-- He cast his eyen upon Emelya, And therewithal he bleynte and cried, ah! As that he stongen were unto the herte.What reader does not refer part of the bitterness of that cry to thespoiling, already foreseen, of that fair friendship, which had hithertomade the prison of the two lads sweet with its daily offices--though thefriendship is saved at last?

The friendship of Amis and Amile is deepened by the romanticcircumstance of an entire personal resemblance between the two heroes,so that they pass for each other again and again, and thereby into manystrange adventures; that curious interest of the Doppelgaenger, whichbegins among the stars with the Dioscuri, being entwined in and outthrough all the incidents of the story, like an outward token of theinward similitude of their souls. With this, again, like a secondreflexion of that inward similitude, is connected the conceit of twomarvellously beautiful cups, also exactly like each other--children'scups, of wood, but adorned with gold and precious stones. These twocups, which by their resemblance help to bring the friends together atcritical moments, were given to them by the Pope, when he baptized themat Rome, whither the parents had taken them for that purpose, inthankfulness for their birth, and cross and recross in the narrative,serving the two heroes almost like living things, and with thatwell-known effect of a beautiful object kept constantly before the eyein a story or poem, of keeping sensation well awake, and giving acertain air of refinement to all the scenes into which it enters; with aheightening also of that sense of fate, which hangs so much of theshaping of human life on trivial objects, like Othello's strawberryhandkerchief; and witnessing to the enjoyment of beautiful handiwork byprimitive people, almost dazzled by it, so that they give it an oddlysignificant place among the factors of a human history.

Amis and Amile, then, are true to their comradeship through all trials;and in the end it comes to pass that at a moment of great need Amistakes the place of Amile in a tournament for life or death. "After thisit happened that a leprosy fell upon Amis, so that his wife would notapproach him, and wrought to strangle him; and he departed from hishome, and at last prayed his servants to carry him to the house ofAmile"; and it is in what follows that the curious strength of the pieceshows itself:--

"His servants, willing to do as he commanded, carried him to the placewhere Amile was: and they began to sound their rattles before the courtof Amile's house, as lepers are accustomed to do. And when Amile heardthe noise he commanded one of his servants to carry meat and bread tothe sick man, and the cup which was given to him at Rome filled withgood wine. And when the servant had done as he was commanded, hereturned and said, Sir, if I had not thy cup in my hand, I shouldbelieve that the cup which the sick man has was thine, for they arealike, the one to the other, in height and fashion. And Amile said, Goquickly and bring him to me. And when Amis stood before his comradeAmile demanded of him who he was, and how he had gotten that cup. I amof Briquam le Chastel, answered Amis, and the cup was given to me by theBishop of Rome, who baptized me. And when Amile heard that, he knew thatit was his comrade Amis, who had delivered him from death, and won forhim the daughter of the King of France to be his wife. And straightwayhe fell upon him, and began to weep greatly, and kissed him. And whenhis wife heard that, she ran out with her hair in disarray, weeping anddistressed exceedingly, for she remembered that it was he who had slainthe false Ardres. And thereupon they placed him in a fair bed, and saidto him, Abide with us until God's will be accomplished in thee, for allthat we have is at thy service. So he and the two servants abode withthem.

"And it came to pass one night, when Amis and Amile lay in one chamberwithout other companions, that God sent His angel Raphael to Amis, whosaid to him, Amis, art thou asleep? And he, supposing that Amile hadcalled him, answered and said, I am not asleep, fair comrade! And theangel said to him, Thou hast answered well, for thou art the comrade ofthe heavenly citizens.--I am Raphael, the angel of our Lord, and am cometo tell thee how thou mayest be healed; for thy prayers are heard. Thoushalt bid Amile, thy comrade, that he slay his two children and washthee in their blood, and so thy body shall be made whole. And Amis saidto him, Let not this thing be, that my comrade should become a murdererfor my sake. But the angel said, It is convenient that he do this. Andthereupon the angel departed.

"And Amile also, as if in sleep, heard those words; and he awoke andsaid, Who is it, my comrade, that hath spoken with thee? And Amisanswered, No man; only I have prayed to our Lord, as I am accustomed.And Amile said, Not so! but some one hath spoken with thee. Then hearose and went to the door of the chamber; and finding it shut he said,Tell me, my brother, who it was said those words to thee to-night. AndAmis began to weep greatly, and told him that it was Raphael, the angelof the Lord, who had said to him, Amis, our Lord commands thee that thoubid Amile slay his two children, and wash thee in their blood, and thoushalt be healed of thy leprosy. And Amile was greatly disturbed at thosewords, and said, I would have given to thee my man-servants and mymaid-servants and all my goods, and thou feignest that an angel hathspoken to thee that I should slay my two children. And immediately Amisbegan to weep, and said, I know that I have spoken to thee a terriblething, but constrained thereto; I pray thee cast me not away from theshelter of thy house. And Amile answered that what he had covenantedwith him, that he would perform, unto the hour of his death: But Iconjure thee, said he, by the faith which there is between me and thee,and by our comradeship, and by the baptism we received together at Rome,that thou tell me whether it was man or angel said that to thee. AndAmis answered, So truly as an angel hath spoken to me this night, so mayGod deliver me from my infirmity!

"Then Amile began to weep in secret, and thought within himself: If thisman was ready to die before the king for me, shall I not for him slay mychildren? Shall I not keep faith with him who was faithful to me evenunto death? And Amile tarried no longer, but departed to the chamber ofhis wife, and bade her go hear the Sacred Office. And he took a sword,and went to the bed where the children were lying, and found themasleep. And he lay down over them and began to weep bitterly and said,Hath any man yet heard of a father who of his own will slew hischildren? Alas, my children! I am no longer your father, but your cruelmurderer.

"And the children awoke at the tears of their father, which fell uponthem; and they looked up into his face and began to laugh. And as theywere of the age of about three years, he said, Your laughing will beturned into tears, for your innocent blood must now be shed, andtherewith he cut off their heads. Then he laid them back in the bed, andput the heads upon the bodies, and covered them as though they weresleeping: and with the blood which he had taken he washed his comrade,and said, Lord Jesus Christ! who hast commanded men to keep faith onearth, and didst heal the leper by Thy word! cleanse now my comrade, forwhose love I have shed the blood of my children.

"Then Amis was cleansed of his leprosy. And Amile clothed his companionin his best robes; and as they went to the church to give thanks, thebells, by the will of God, rang of their own accord. And when the peopleof the city heard that, they ran together to see the marvel. And thewife of Amile, when she saw Amis and Amile coming, began to ask which ofthe twain was her husband, and said, I know well the vesture of themboth, but I know not which of them is Amile. And Amile said to her, I amAmile, and my companion is Amis, who is healed of his sickness. And shewas full of wonder, and desired to know in what manner he was healed.Give thanks to our Lord, answered Amile, but trouble not thyself as tothe manner of the healing.

"Now neither the father nor the mother had yet entered where thechildren were; but the father sighed heavily because of their death, andthe mother asked for them, that they might rejoice together; but Amilesaid, Dame! Let the children sleep. And it was already the hour ofTierce. And going in alone to the children to weep over them, he foundthem at play in the bed; only, in the place of the sword-cuts abouttheir throats was as it were a thread of crimson. And he took them inhis arms and carried them to his wife and said, Rejoice greatly, for thychildren whom I had slain by the commandment of the angel are alive, andby their blood is Amis healed."

There, as I said, is the strength of the old French story. For theRenaissance has not only the sweetness which it derives from theclassical world, but also that curious strength of which there are greatresources in the true middle age. And as I have illustrated the earlystrength of the Renaissance by the story of Amis and Amile, a storywhich comes from the North, in which even a certain racy Teutonicflavour is perceptible, so I shall illustrate that other element of itsearly sweetness, a languid excess of sweetness even, by another storyprinted in the same volume of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne, and ofabout the same date, a story which comes, characteristically, from theSouth, and connects itself with the literature of Provence.

The central love-poetry of Provence, the poetry of the Tenson and theAubade, of Bernard de Ventadour and Pierre Vidal, is poetry for the few,for the elect and peculiar people of the kingdom of sentiment. But belowthis intenser poetry there was probably a wide range of literature, lessserious and elevated, reaching, by lightness of form and comparativehomeliness of interest, an audience which the concentrated passion ofthose higher lyrics left untouched. This literature has long sinceperished, or lives only in later French or Italian versions. One suchversion, the only representative of its species, M. Fauriel thought hedetected in the story of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the Frenchof the latter half of the thirteenth century, and preserved in a uniquemanuscript, in the national library of Paris; and there were reasonswhich made him divine for it a still more ancient ancestry, traces in itof an Arabian origin, as in a leaf lost out of some early ArabianNights.* The little book loses none of its interest through thecriticism which finds in it only a traditional subject, handed on by onepeople to another; for after passing thus from hand to hand, its outlineis still clear, its surface untarnished; and, like many other stories,books, literary and artistic conceptions of the middle age, it has cometo have in this way a sort of personal history, almost as full of riskand adventure as that of its own heroes. The writer himself calls thepiece a cantefable, a tale told in prose, but with its incidents andsentiment helped forward by songs, inserted at irregular intervals. Inthe junctions of the story itself there are signs of roughness and wantof skill, which make one suspect that the prose was only put together toconnect a series of songs--a series of songs so moving and attractivethat people wished to heighten and dignify their effect by a regularframework or setting. Yet the songs themselves are of the simplest kind,not rhymed even, but only imperfectly assonant, stanzas of twenty orthirty lines apiece, all ending with a similar vowel sound. And here, aselsewhere in that early poetry, much of the interest lies in thespectacle of the formation of a new artistic sense. A new music isarising, the music of rhymed poetry, and in the songs of Aucassin andNicolette, which seem always on the point of passing into true rhyme,but which halt somehow, and can never quite take flight, you see peoplejust growing aware of the elements of a new music in their possession,and anticipating how pleasant such music might become. The piece wasprobably intended to be recited by a company of trained performers, manyof whom, at least for the lesser parts, were probably children. Thesongs are introduced by the rubric, Or se cante (ici on chante); andeach division of prose by the rubric, Or dient et content et fabloient(ici on conte). The musical notes of part of the songs have beenpreserved; and some of the details are so descriptive that theysuggested to M. Fauriel the notion that the words had been accompaniedthroughout by dramatic action. That mixture of simplicity and refinementwhich he was surprised to find in a composition of the thirteenthcentury, is shown sometimes in the turn given to some passing expressionor remark; thus, "the Count de Garins was old and frail, his time wasover"--Li quens Garins de Beaucaire estoit vix et frales; si avoit sontans trespasse. And then, all is so realised! One still sees the ancientforest, with its disused roads grown deep with grass, and the placewhere seven roads meet--u a forkeut set cemin qui s'en vont par le pais;we hear the light-hearted country people calling each other by theirrustic names, and putting forward, as their spokesman, one among themwho is more eloquent and ready than the rest--li un qui plus fu enparlesdes autres; for the little book has its burlesque element also, so thatone hears the faint, far-off laughter still. Rough as it is, the piececertainly possesses this high quality of poetry, that it aims at apurely artistic effect. Its subject is a great sorrow, yet it claims tobe a thing of joy and refreshment, to be entertained not for its matteronly, but chiefly for its manner; it is cortois, it tells us, et bienassis.

*Recently, Aucassin and Nicolette has been edited and translated intoEnglish, with much graceful scholarship, by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon. Morerecently still we have had a translation--a poet's translation--from theingenious and versatile pen of Mr. Andrew Lang. The reader shouldconsult also the chapter on "The Out-door Poetry," in Vernon Lee's mostinteresting Euphorion; being Studies of the Antique and Mediaeval in theRenaissance, a work abounding in knowledge and insight on the subjectsof which it treats.

For the student of manners, and of the old language and literature, ithas much interest of a purely antiquarian order. To say of an ancientliterary composition that it has an antiquarian interest, often meansthat it has no distinct aesthetic interest for the reader of to-day.Antiquarianism, by a purely historical effort, by putting its object inperspective, and setting the reader in a certain point of view, fromwhich what gave pleasure to the past is pleasurable for him also, mayoften add greatly to the charm we receive from ancient literature. Butthe first condition of such aid must be a real, direct, aesthetic charmin the thing itself; unless it has that charm, unless some purelyartistic quality went to its original making, no merely antiquarianeffort can ever give it an aesthetic value, or make it a proper subjectof aesthetic criticism. This quality, wherever it exists, it is alwayspleasant to define, and discriminate from the sort of borrowed interestwhich an old play, or an old story, may very likely acquire through atrue antiquarianism. The story of Aucassin and Nicolette has somethingof this quality. Aucassin, the only son of Count Garins of Beaucaire, ispassionately in love with Nicolette, a beautiful girl of unknownparentage, bought of the Saracens, whom his father will not permit himto marry. The story turns on the adventures of these two lovers, untilat the end of the piece their mutual fidelity is rewarded. Theseadventures are of the simplest sort, adventures which seem to be chosenfor the happy occasion they afford of keeping the eye of the fancy,perhaps the outward eye, fixed on pleasant objects, a garden, a ruinedtower, the little hut of flowers which Nicolette constructs in theforest whither she has escaped from her enemies, as a token to Aucassinthat she has passed that way. All the charm of the piece is in itsdetails, in a turn of peculiar lightness and grace given to thesituations and traits of sentiment, especially in its quaint fragmentsof early French prose.

All through it one feels the influence of that faint air of overwroughtdelicacy, almost of wantonness, which was so strong a characteristic ofthe poetry of the Troubadours. The Troubadours themselves were often menof great rank; they wrote for an exclusive audience, people of muchleisure and great refinement, and they came to value a type of personalbeauty which has in it but little of the influence of the open air andsunshine. There is a languid Eastern deliciousness in the very sceneryof the story, the full-blown roses, the chamber painted in somemysterious manner where Nicolette is imprisoned, the cool brown marble,the almost nameless colours, the odour of plucked grass and flowers.Nicolette herself well becomes this scenery, and is the bestillustration of the quality I mean--the beautiful, weird, foreign girl,whom the shepherds take for a fay, who has the knowledge of simples, thehealing and beautifying qualities of leaves and flowers, whose skilfultouch heals Aucassin's sprained shoulder, so that he suddenly leaps fromthe ground; the mere sight of whose white flesh, as she passed the placewhere he lay, healed a pilgrim stricken with sore disease, so that herose up, and returned to his own country. With this girl Aucassin is sodeeply in love that he forgets all his knightly duties. At lastNicolette is shut up to get her out of his way, and perhaps theprettiest passage in the whole piece is the fragment of prose whichdescribes her escape from this place:--

"Aucassin was put in prison, as you have heard, and Nicolette remainedshut up in her chamber. It was summer-time, in the month of May, whenthe days are warm and long and clear, and the nights coy and serene.

"One night Nicolette, lying on her bed, saw the moon shine clear throughthe little window, and heard the nightingale sing in the garden, andthen came the memory of Aucassin, whom she so much loved. She thought ofthe Count Garins of Beaucaire, who so mortally hated her, and, to be ridof her, might at any moment cause her to be burned or drowned. Sheperceived that the old woman who kept her company was asleep; she roseand put on the fairest gown she had; she took the bed-clothes and thetowels, and knotted them together like a cord, as far as they would go.Then she tied the end to a pillar of the window, and let herself slipdown quite softly into the garden, and passed straight across it, toreach the town.

"Her hair was yellow in small curls, her smiling eyes blue-green, herface clear and feat, the little lips very red, the teeth small andwhite; and the daisies which she crushed in passing, holding her skirthigh behind and before, looked dark against her feet; the girl was sowhite!

"She came to the garden-gate and opened it, and walked through thestreets of Beaucaire, keeping on the dark side of the way to avoid thelight of the moon, which shone quietly in the sky. She walked as fast asshe could, until she came to the tower where Aucassin was. The tower wasset about with pillars, here and there. She pressed herself against oneof the pillars, wrapped herself closely in her mantle, and putting herface to a chink of the tower, which was old and ruined, she heardAucassin crying bitterly within, and when she had listened awhile shebegan to speak."

But scattered up and down through this lighter matter, always tingedwith humour and often passing into burlesque, which makes up the generalsubstance of the piece, there are morsels of a different quality,touches of some intenser sentiment, coming it would seem from theprofound and energetic spirit of the Provencal poetry itself, to whichthe inspiration of the book has been referred. Let me gather up thesemorsels of deeper colour, these expressions of the ideal intensity oflove, the motive which really unites together the fragments of thelittle composition. Dante, the perfect flower of ideal love, hasrecorded how the tyranny of that "Lord of terrible aspect" becameactually physical, blinding his senses, and suspending his bodilyforces. In this Dante is but the central expression and type ofexperiences known well enough to the initiated, in that passionate age.Aucassin represents this ideal intensity of passion-- Aucassin, li biax, li blons, Li gentix, li amorous;the slim, tall, debonair figure, dansellon, as the singers call him,with curled yellow hair, and eyes of vair, who faints with love, asDante fainted, who rides all day through the forest in search ofNicolette, while the thorns tear his flesh, so that one night havetraced him by the blood upon the grass, and who weeps at evening becausehe has not found her--who has the malady of his love, so that heneglects all knightly duties. Once he is induced to put himself at thehead of his people, that they, seeing him before them, might have moreheart to defend themselves; then a song relates how the sweet, gravefigure goes forth to battle, in dainty, tight-laced armour. It is thevery image of the Provencal love-god, no longer a child, but grown topensive youth, as Pierre Vidal met him, riding on a white horse, fair asthe morning, his vestment embroidered with flowers. He rode on throughthe gates into the open plain beyond. But as he went, that great maladyof his love came upon him, so that the bridle fell from his hands; andlike one who sleeps walking, he was carried on into the midst of hisenemies, and heard them talking together how they might mostconveniently kill him.

One of the strongest characteristics of that outbreak of the reason andthe imagination, of that assertion of the liberty of the heart, in themiddle age, which I have termed a medieval Renaissance, was itsantinomianism, its spirit of rebellion and revolt against the moral andreligious ideas of the time. In their search after the pleasures of thesenses and the imagination, in their care for beauty, in their worshipof the body, people were impelled beyond the bounds of the Christianideal; and their love became sometimes a strange idolatry, a strangerival religion. It was the return of that ancient Venus, not dead, butonly hidden for a time in the caves of the Venusberg, of those old pagangods still going to and fro on the earth, under all sorts of disguises.And this element in the middle age, for the most part ignored by thosewriters who have treated it pre-eminently as the "Age of Faith"--thisrebellious and antinomian element, the recognition of which has made thedelineation of the middle age by the writers of the Romantic school inFrance, by Victor Hugo for instance in Notre-Dame de Paris, sosuggestive and exciting, is found alike in the history of Abelard andthe legend of Tannhaeuser. More and more, as we come to mark changes anddistinctions of temper in what is often in one all-embracing confusioncalled the middle age, this rebellious element, this sinister claim forliberty of heart and thought, comes to the surface. The Albigensianmovement, connected so strangely with the history of Provencal poetry,is deeply tinged with it. A touch of it makes the Franciscan order, withits poetry, its mysticism, its "illumination," from the point of view ofreligious authority, justly suspect. It influences the thoughts of thoseobscure prophetical writers, like Joachim of Flora, strange dreamers ina world of flowery rhetoric of that third and final dispensation of a"spirit of freedom," in which law shall have passed away. Of this spiritAucassin and Nicolette contains perhaps the most famous expression: itis the answer Aucassin gives when he is threatened with the pains ofhell, if he makes Nicolette his mistress. A creature wholly of affectionand the senses, he sees on the way to paradise only a feeble company ofaged priests, "clinging day and night to the chapel altars," barefoot orin patched sandals. With or even without Nicolette, "his sweet mistresswhom he so much loves," he, for his part, is ready to start on the wayto hell, along with "the good scholars," as he says, and the actors, andthe fine horsemen dead in battle, and the men of fashion,* and "the faircourteous ladies who had two or three chevaliers apiece beside their owntrue lords," all gay with music, in their gold and silver and beautifulfurs--"the vair and the grey."

*Parage, peerage--which came to signify all that ambitious youthaffected most on the outside of life, in that old world of theTroubadours, with whom this term is of frequent recurrence.

But in the House Beautiful the saints too have their place; and thestudent of the Renaissance has this advantage over the student of theemancipation of the human mind in the Reformation, or the FrenchRevolution, that in tracing the footsteps of humanity to higher levels,he is not beset at every turn by the inflexibilities and antagonisms ofsome well-recognised controversy, with rigidly defined opposites,exhausting the intelligence and limiting one's sympathies. Theopposition of the professional defenders of a mere system to that moresincere and general play of the forces of human mind and character,which I have noted as the secret of Abelard's struggle, is indeed alwayspowerful. But the incompatibility of souls really "fair" is notessential; and within the enchanted region of the Renaissance, one needsnot be for ever on one's guard: here there are no fixed parties, noexclusions: all breathes of that unity of culture in which "whatsoeverthings are comely" are reconciled, for the elevation and adorning of ourspirits. And just in proportion as those who took part in theRenaissance become centrally representative of it, just so much the moreis this condition realised in them. The wicked popes, and the lovelesstyrants, who from time to time became its patrons, or mere speculatorsin its fortunes, lend themselves easily to disputations, and, from thisside or that, the spirit of controversy lays just hold upon them. Butthe painter of the Last Supper, with his kindred, live in a land wherecontroversy has no breathing-place, and refuse to be classified. In thestory of Aucassin and Nicolette, in the literature which it represents,the note of defiance, of the opposition of one system to another, issometimes harsh: let me conclude with a morsel from Amis and Amile, inwhich the harmony of human interests is still entire. For the story ofthe great traditional friendship, in which, as I said, the liberty ofthe heart makes itself felt, seems, as we have it, to have been writtenby a monk--La vie des saints martyrs Amis et Amile. It was not till theend of the seventeenth century that their names were finally excludedfrom the martyrology; and their story ends with this monkish miracle ofearthly comradeship, more than faithful unto death:--

"For, as God had united them in their lives in one accord, so they werenot divided in their death, falling together side by side, with a hostof other brave men, in battle for King Charles at Mortara, so calledfrom that great slaughter. And the bishops gave counsel to the king andqueen that they should bury the dead, and build a church in that place;and their counsel pleased the king greatly; and there were built theretwo churches, the one by commandment of the king in honour of SaintOseige, and the other by commandment of the queen in honour of SaintPeter.

"And the king caused the two chests of stone to be brought in the whichthe bodies of Amis and Amile lay; and Amile was carried to the church ofSaint Peter, and Amis to the church of Saint Oseige; and the othercorpses were buried, some in one place and some in the other. But lo!next morning, the body of Amile in his coffin was found lying in thechurch of Saint Oseige, beside the coffin of Amis his comrade. Beholdthen this wondrous amity, which by death could not be dissevered!

"This miracle God did, who gave to His disciples power to removemountains. And by reason of this miracle the king and queen remained inthat place for a space of thirty days, and performed the offices of thedead who were slain, and honoured the said churches with great gifts:and the bishop ordained many clerks to serve in the church of SaintOseige, and commanded them that they should guard duly, with greatdevotion, the bodies of the two companions, Amis and Amile."

1872.

PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of theattempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century toreconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. To reconcileforms of sentiment which at first sight seem incompatible, to adjust thevarious products of the human mind to each other in one many-sided typeof intellectual culture, to give humanity, for heart and imagination tofeed upon, as much as it could possibly receive, belonged to thegenerous instincts of that age. An earlier and simpler generation hadseen in the gods of Greece so many malignant spirits, the defeated butstill living centres of the religion of darkness, struggling, not alwaysin vain, against the kingdom of light. Little by little, as the naturalcharm of pagan story reasserted itself over minds emerging out ofbarbarism, the religious significance which had once belonged to it waslost sight of, and it came to be regarded as the subject of a purelyartistic or poetical treatment. But it was inevitable that from time totime minds should arise, deeply enough impressed by its beauty and powerto ask themselves whether the religion of Greece was indeed a rival ofthe religion of Christ; for the older gods had rehabilitated themselves,and men's allegiance was divided. And the fifteenth century was animpassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that itconsecrated everything with which art had to do as a religious object.The restored Greek literature had made it familiar, at least in Plato,with a style of expression concerning the earlier gods, which had aboutit much of the warmth and unction of a Christian hymn. It was toofamiliar with such language to regard mythology as a mere story; and itwas too serious to play with a religion.

"Let me briefly remind the reader"--says Heine, in the Gods in Exile, anessay full of that strange blending of sentiment which is characteristicof the traditions of the middle age concerning the pagan religions--"howthe gods of the older world, at the time of the definite triumph ofChristianity, that is, in the third century, fell into painfulembarrassments, which greatly resembled certain tragical situations oftheir earlier life. They now found themselves beset by the sametroublesome necessities to which they had once before been exposedduring the primitive ages, in that revolutionary epoch when the Titansbroke out of the custody of Orcus, and, piling Pelion on Ossa, scaledOlympus. Unfortunate Gods! They had then to take flight ignominiously,and hide themselves among us here on earth, under all sorts ofdisguises. The larger number betook themselves to Egypt, where forgreater security they assumed the forms of animals, as is generallyknown. Just in the same way, they had to take flight again, and seekentertainment in remote hiding-places, when those iconoclastic zealots,the black brood of monks, broke down all the temples, and pursued thegods with fire and curses. Many of these unfortunate emigrants, nowentirely deprived of shelter and ambrosia, must needs take to vulgarhandicrafts, as a means of earning their bread. Under thesecircumstances, many whose sacred groves had been confiscated, letthemselves out for hire as wood-cutters in Germany, and were forced todrink beer instead of nectar. Apollo seems to have been content to takeservice under graziers, and as he had once kept the cows of Admetus, sohe lived now as a shepherd in Lower Austria. Here, however, havingbecome suspected on account of his beautiful singing, he was recognisedby a learned monk as one of the old pagan gods, and handed over to thespiritual tribunal. On the rack he confessed that he was the god Apollo;and before his execution he begged that he might be suffered to playonce more upon the lyre, and to sing a song. And he played sotouchingly, and sang with such magic, and was withal so beautiful inform and feature, that all the women wept, and many of them were sodeeply impressed that they shortly afterwards fell sick. And some timeafterwards the people wished to drag him from the grave again, so that astake might be driven through his body, in the belief that he had been avampire, and that the sick women would by this means recover. But theyfound the grave empty."

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, greatrather by what it designed than by what it achieved. Much which itaspired to do, and did but imperfectly or mistakenly, was accomplishedin what is called the eclaircissement of the eighteenth century, or inour own generation; and what really belongs to the rival of thefifteenth century is but the leading instinct, the curiosity, theinitiatory idea. It is so with this very question of the reconciliationof the religion of antiquity with the religion of Christ. A modernscholar occupied by this problem might observe that all religions may beregarded as natural products; that, at least in their origin, theirgrowth, and decay, they have common laws, and are not to be isolatedfrom the other movements of the human mind in the periods in which theyrespectively prevailed; that they arise spontaneously out of the humanmind, as expressions of the varying phases of its sentiment concerningthe unseen world; that every intellectual product must be judged fromthe point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.He might go on to observe that each has contributed something to thedevelopment of the religious sense, and ranging them as so many stagesin the gradual education of the human mind, justify the existence ofeach. The basis of the reconciliation of the religions of the worldwould thus be the inexhaustible activity and creativeness of the humanmind itself, in which all religions alike have their root, and inwhich all alike are reconciled; just as the fancies of childhood and thethoughts of old age meet and are laid to rest, in the experience of theindividual. Far different was the method followed by the scholars of thefifteenth century. They lacked the very rudiments of the historic sense,which, by an imaginative act, throws itself back into a world unlikeone's own, and estimates every intellectual creation in its connexionwith the age from which it proceeded; they had no idea of development,of the differences of ages, of the gradual education of the human race.In their attempts to reconcile the religions of the world, they werethus thrown back upon the quicksand of allegorical interpretation. Thereligions of the world were to be reconciled, not as successive stages,in a gradual development of the religious sense, but as subsisting sideby side, and substantially in agreement with each other. And here thefirst necessity was to misrepresent the language, the conceptions, thesentiments, it was proposed to compare and reconcile. Plato and Homermust be made to speak agreeably to Moses. Set side by side, the meresurfaces could never unite in any harmony of design. Therefore one mustgo below the surface, and bring up the supposed secondary, or still moreremote meaning, that diviner signification held in reserve, in recessudivinius aliquid, latent in some stray touch of Homer, or figure ofspeech in the books of Moses.

And yet as a curiosity of the human mind, a "madhouse-cell," if youwill, into which we peep for a moment, and see it at work weavingstrange fancies, the allegorical interpretation of the fifteenth centuryhas its interest. With its strange web of imagery, its quaint conceits,its unexpected combinations and subtle moralising, it is an element inthe local colour of a great age. It illustrates also the faith of thatage in all oracles, its desire to hear all voices, its generous beliefthat nothing which had ever interested the human mind could wholly loseits vitality. It is the counterpart, though certainly the feeblercounterpart, of that practical truce and reconciliation of the gods ofGreece with the Christian religion, which is seen in the art of thetime; and it is for his share in this work, and because his own story isa sort of analogue or visible equivalent to the expression of thispurpose in his writings, that something of a general interest stillbelongs to the name of Pico della Mirandola, whose life, written by hisnephew Francis, seemed worthy, for some touch of sweetness in it, to betranslated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More, that greatlover of Italian culture, among whose works this life of Pico, Earlof Mirandola, and a great lord of Italy, as he calls him, may still beread, in its quaint, antiquated English.

Marsilio Ficino has told us how Pico came to Florence. It was the veryday--some day probably in the year 1482--on which Ficino had finishedhis famous translation of Plato into Latin, the work to which he hadbeen dedicated from childhood by Cosmo de' Medici, in furtherance of hisdesire to resuscitate the knowledge of Plato among his fellow-citizens.Florence indeed, as M. Renan has pointed out, had always had an affinityfor the mystic and dreamy philosophy of Plato, while the colder and morepractical philosophy of Aristotle had flourished in Padua, and othercities of the north; and the Florentines, though they knew perhaps verylittle about him, had had the name of the great idealist often on theirlips. To increase this knowledge, Cosmo had founded the Platonicacademy, with periodical discussions at the villa of Careggi. The fallof Constantinople in 1453, and the council in 1438 for thereconciliation of the Greek and Latin Churches, had brought to Florencemany a needy Greek scholar. And now the work was completed, the door ofthe mystical temple lay open to all who could construe Latin, and thescholar rested from his labour; when there was introduced into hisstudy, where a lamp burned continually before the bust of Plato, asother men burned lamps before their favourite saints, a young man freshfrom a journey, "of feature and shape seemly and beauteous, of staturegoodly and high, of flesh tender and soft, his visage lovely and fair,his colour white, intermingled with comely reds, his eyes grey, andquick of look, his teeth white and even, his hair yellow and abundant,"and trimmed with more than the usual artifice of the time. It is thusthat Sir Thomas More translates the words of the biographer of Pico,who, even in outward form and appearance, seems an image of that inwardharmony and completeness, of which he is so perfect an example. The wordmystic has been usually derived from a Greek word which signifies toshut, as if one shut one's lips, brooding on what cannot be uttered; butthe Platonists themselves derive it rather from the act of shutting theeyes, that one may see the more, inwardly. Perhaps the eyes of themystic Ficino, now long past the midway of life, had come to be thushalf-closed; but when a young man, not unlike the archangel Raphael, asthe Florentines of that age depicted him in his wonderful walk withTobit, or Mercury, as he might have appeared in a painting by SandroBotticelli or Piero di Cosimo, entered his chamber, he seems to havethought there was something not wholly earthly about him; at least, heever afterwards believed that it was not without the co-operation of thestars that the stranger had arrived on that day. For it happened thatthey fell into a conversation, deeper and more intimate than men usuallyfall into at first sight. During this conversation Ficino formed thedesign of devoting his remaining years to the translation of Plotinus,that new Plato, in whom the mystical element in the Platonic philosophyhad been worked out to the utmost limit of vision and ecstasy; and it isin dedicating this translation to Lorenzo de' Medici that Ficino hasrecorded these incidents.

It was after many wanderings, wanderings of the intellect as well asphysical journeys, that Pico came to rest at Florence. He was then abouttwenty years old, having been born in 1463. He was called Giovanni atbaptism; Pico, like all his ancestors, from Picus, nephew of the EmperorConstantine, from whom they claimed to be descended; and Mirandola, fromthe place of his birth, a little town afterwards part of the duchy ofModena, of which small territory his family had long been the feudallords. Pico was the youngest of the family, and his mother, delightingin his wonderful memory, sent him at the age of fourteen to the famousschool of law at Bologna. From the first, indeed, she seems to have hadsome presentiment of his future fame, for, with a faith in omenscharacteristic of her time, she believed that a strange circumstance hadhappened at the time of Pico's birth--the appearance of a circular flamewhich suddenly vanished away, on the wall of the chamber where she lay.He remained two years at Bologna; and then, with an inexhaustible,unrivalled thirst for knowledge, the strange, confused, uncriticallearning of that age, passed through the principal schools of Italy andFrance, penetrating, as he thought, into the secrets of all ancientphilosophies, and many eastern languages. And with this flood oferudition came the generous hope, so often disabused, of reconciling thephilosophers with each other, and all alike with the Church. At last hecame to Rome. There, like some knight-errant of philosophy, he offeredto defend nine hundred bold paradoxes, drawn from the most oppositesources, against all comers. But the pontifical court was led to suspectthe orthodoxy of some of these propositions, and even the reading of thebook which contained them was forbidden by the Pope. It was not until1493 that Pico was finally absolved, by a brief of Alexander the Sixth.Ten years before that date he had arrived at Florence; an early instanceof those who, after following the vain hope of an impossiblereconciliation from system to system, have at last fallen backunsatisfied on the simplicities of their childhood's belief.

The oration which Pico composed for the opening of this philosophicaltournament still remains; its subject is the dignity of human nature,the greatness of man. In common with nearly all medieval speculation,much of Pico's writing has this for its drift; and in common also withit, Pico's theory of that dignity is founded on a misconception of theplace in nature both of the earth and of man. For Pico the earth is thecentre of the universe: and around it, as a fixed and motionless point,the sun and moon and stars revolve, like diligent servants or ministers.And in the midst of all is placed man, nodus et vinculum mundi, the bondor copula of the world, and the "interpreter of nature": that famousexpression of Bacon's really belongs to Pico. Tritum est in scholis, hesays, esse hominem minorem mundum, in quo mixtum ex elementis corpus etspiritus coelestis et plantarum anima vegetalis et brutorum sensus etratio et angelica mens et Dei similitudo conspicitur.--"It is acommonplace of the schools that man is a little world, in which we maydiscern a body mingled of earthy elements, and ethereal breath, and thevegetable life of plants, and the senses of the lower animals, andreason, and the intelligence of angels, and a likeness to God."--Acommonplace of the schools! But perhaps it had some new significance andauthority, when men heard one like Pico reiterate it; and, false as itsbasis was, the theory had its use. For this high dignity of man, thusbringing the dust under his feet into sensible communion with thethoughts and affections of the angels, was supposed to belong to him,not as renewed by a religious system, but by his own natural right. Theproclamation of it was a counterpoise to the increasing tendency ofmedieval religion to depreciate man's nature, to sacrifice this or thatelement in it, to make it ashamed of itself, to keep the degrading orpainful accidents of it always in view. It helped man onward to thatreassertion of himself, that rehabilitation of human nature, the body,the senses, the heart, the intelligence, which the Renaissance fulfils.And yet to read a page of one of Pico's forgotten books is like a glanceinto one of those ancient sepulchres, upon which the wanderer inclassical lands has sometimes stumbled, with the old disused ornamentsand furniture of a world wholly unlike ours still fresh in them. Thatwhole conception of nature is so different from our own. For Pico theworld is a limited place, bounded by actual crystal walls, and amaterial firmament; it is like a painted toy, like that map or system ofthe world, held, as a great target or shield, in the hands of thegrey-headed father of all things, in one of the earlier frescoes of theCampo Santo at Pisa. How different from this childish dream is our ownconception of nature, with its unlimited space, its innumerable suns,and the earth but a mote in the beam; how different the strange new awe,or superstition, with which it fills our minds! "The silence of thoseinfinite spaces," says Pascal, contemplating a starlight night, "thesilence of those infinite spaces terrifies me"--Le silence eternel deces espaces infinis m'effraie.

He was already almost wearied out when he came to Florence. He had lovedmuch and been beloved by women, "wandering over the crooked hills ofdelicious pleasure"; but their reign over him was over, and long beforeSavonarola's famous "bonfire of vanities," he had destroyed thoselove-songs in the vulgar tongue, which would have been such a relief tous, after the scholastic prolixity of his Latin writings. It was inanother spirit that he composed a Platonic commentary, the only work ofhis in Italian which has come down to us, on the "Song of DivineLove"--secondo la mente ed opinione dei Platonici--"according to themind and opinion of the Platonists," by his friend Hieronymo Beniveni,in which, with an ambitious array of every sort of learning, and aprofusion of imagery borrowed indifferently from the astrologers, theCabala, and Homer, and Scripture, and Dionysius the Areopagite, heattempts to define the stages by which the soul passes from the earthlyto the unseen beauty. A change indeed had passed over him, as if thechilling touch of the abstract and disembodied beauty Platonists professto long for was already upon him; and perhaps it was a sense of this,coupled with that over-brightness which in the popular imaginationalways betokens an early death, that made Camilla Rucellai, one of thoseprophetic women whom the preaching of Savonarola had raised up inFlorence, declare, seeing him for the first time, that he would departin the time of lilies--prematurely, that is, like the field-flowerswhich are withered by the scorching sun almost as soon as they aresprung up. It was now that he wrote down those thoughts on the religiouslife which Sir Thomas More turned into English, and which anotherEnglish translator thought worthy to be added to the books of theImitation. "It is not hard to know God, provided one will not forceoneself to define Him":--has been thought a great saying of Joubert's."Love God," Pico writes to Angelo Politian, "we rather may, than eitherknow Him, or by speech utter Him. And yet had men liefer by knowledgenever find that which they seek, than by love possess that thing, whichalso without love were in vain found."

Yet he who had this fine touch for spiritual things did not--and in thisis the enduring interest of his story--even after his conversion, forgetthe old gods. He is one of the last who seriously and sincerelyentertained the claims on men's faith of the pagan religions; he isanxious to ascertain the true significance of the obscurest legend, thelightest tradition concerning them. With many thoughts and manyinfluences which led him in that direction, he did not become a monk;only he became gentle and patient in disputation; retaining "somewhat ofthe old plenty, in dainty viand and silver vessel," he gave over thegreater part of his property to his friend, the mystical poet Beniveni,to be spent by him in works of charity, chiefly in the sweet charity ofproviding marriage-dowries for the peasant girls of Florence. His endcame in 1494, when, amid the prayers and sacraments of Savonarola, hedied of fever, on the very day on which Charles the Eighth enteredFlorence, the seventeenth of November, yet in the time of lilies--thelilies of the shield of France, as the people now said, rememberingCamilla's prophecy. He was buried in the cloister at Saint Mark's, inthe hood and white frock of the Dominican order.

It is because the life of Pico, thus lying down to rest in theDominican habit, yet amid thoughts of the older gods, himself like oneof those comely divinities, reconciled indeed to the new religion, butstill with a tenderness for the earlier life, and desirous literally to"bind the ages each to each by natural piety"--it is because this lifeis so perfect a parallel to the attempt made in his writings toreconcile Christianity with the ideas of paganism, that Pico, in spiteof the scholastic character of those writings, is really interesting.Thus, in the Heptaplus, or Discourse on the Seven Days of the Creation,he endeavours to reconcile the accounts which pagan philosophy had givenof the origin of the world with the account given in the books ofMoses--the Timaeus of Plato with the book of Genesis. The Heptaplus isdedicated to Lorenzo the Magnificent, whose interest, the preface tellsus, in the secret wisdom of Moses is well known. If Moses seems in hiswritings simple and even popular, rather than either a philosopher or atheologian, that is because it was an institution with the ancientphilosophers, either not to speak of divine things at all, or to speakof them dissemblingly: hence their doctrines were called mysteries.Taught by them, Pythagoras became so great a "master of silence," andwrote almost nothing, thus hiding the words of God in his heart, andspeaking wisdom only among the perfect. In explaining the harmonybetween Plato and Moses, Pico lays hold on every sort of figure andanalogy, on the double meanings of words, the symbols of the Jewishritual, the secondary meanings of obscure stories in the later Greekmythologists. Everywhere there is an unbroken system of correspondences.Every object in the terrestrial world is an analogue, a symbol orcounterpart, of some higher reality in the starry heavens, and thisagain of some law of the angelic life in the world beyond the stars.There is the element of fire in the material world; the sun is the fireof heaven; and in the super-celestial world there is the fire of theseraphic intelligence. "But behold how they differ! The elementary fireburns, the heavenly fire vivifies, the super-celestial fire loves." Inthis way, every natural object, every combination of natural forces,every accident in the lives of men, is filled with higher meanings.Omens, prophecies, supernatural coincidences, accompany Pico himself allthrough life. There are oracles in every tree and mountain-top, and asignificance in every accidental combination of the events of life.

This constant tendency to symbolism and imagery gives Pico's work afigured style, by which it has some real resemblance to Plato's, and hediffers from other mystical writers of his time by a real desire to knowhis authorities at first hand. He reads Plato in Greek, Moses in Hebrew,and by this his work really belongs to the higher culture. Above all, wehave a constant sense in reading him, that his thoughts, however littletheir positive value may be, are connected with springs beneath them ofdeep and passionate emotion; and when he explains the grades or steps bywhich the soul passes from the love of a physical object to the love ofunseen beauty, and unfolds the analogies between this process and othermovements upward of human thought, there is a glow and vehemence in hiswords which remind one of the manner in which his own brief existenceflamed itself away.

I said that the Renaissance of the fifteenth century was in many thingsgreat, rather by what it designed or aspired to do, than by what itactually achieved. It remained for a later age to conceive the truemethod of effecting a scientific reconciliation of Christian sentimentwith the imagery, the legends, the theories about the world, of paganpoetry and philosophy. For that age the only possible reconciliation wasan imaginative one, and resulted from the efforts of artists, trained inChristian schools, to handle pagan subjects; and of this artisticreconciliation work like Pico's was but the feebler counterpart.Whatever philosophers had to say on one side or the other, whether theywere successful or not in their attempts to reconcile the old to thenew, and to justify the expenditure of so much care and thought on thedreams of a dead faith, the imagery of the Greek religion, the directcharm of its story, were by artists valued and cultivated for their ownsake. Hence a new sort of mythology, with a tone and qualities of itsown. When the ship-load of sacred earth from the soil of Jerusalem wasmingled with the common clay in the Campo Santo at Pisa, a new flowergrew up from it, unlike any flower men had seen before, the anemone withits concentric rings of strangely blended colour, still to be found bythose who search long enough for it, in the long grass of the Maremma.Just such a strange flower was that mythology of the ItalianRenaissance, which grew up from the mixture of two traditions, twosentiments, the sacred and the profane. Classical story was regarded asso much imaginative material to be received and assimilated. It did notcome into men's minds to ask curiously of science concerning its origin,its primary form and import, its meaning for those who projected it. Itsank into their minds, to issue forth again with all the tangle about itof medieval sentiment and ideas. In the Doni Madonna in the Tribune ofthe Uffizii, Michelangelo actually brings the pagan religion, and withit the unveiled human form, the sleepy-looking fauns of a Dionysiacrevel, into the presence of the Madonna, as simpler painters hadintroduced there other products of the earth, birds or flowers; and hehas given to that Madonna herself much of the uncouth energy of theolder and more primitive "Mighty Mother."

It is because this picturesque union of contrasts, belonging properly tothe art of the close of the fifteenth century, pervades, in Pico dellaMirandola, an actual person, that the figure of Pico is so attractive.He will not let one go; he wins one on, in spite of oneself, to turnagain to the pages of his forgotten books, although we know already thatthe actual solution proposed in them will satisfy us as little asperhaps it satisfied him. It is said that in his eagerness formysterious learning he once paid a great sum for a collection ofcabalistic manuscripts, which turned out to be forgeries; and the storymight well stand as a parable of all he ever seemed to gain in the wayof actual knowledge. He had sought knowledge, and passed from system tosystem, and hazarded much; but less for the sake of positive knowledgethan because he believed there was a spirit of order and beauty inknowledge, which would come down and unite what men's ignorance haddivided, and renew what time had made dim. And so, while his actual workhas passed away, yet his own qualities are still active, and he himselfremains, as one alive in the grave, caesiis et vigilibus oculis, as hisbiographer describes him, and with that sanguine, clear skin, decentirubore interspersa, as with the light of morning upon it; and he has atrue place in that group of great Italians who fill the end of thefifteenth century with their names, he is a true HUMANIST. For theessence of humanism is that belief of which he seems never to havedoubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women canwholly lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oraclebeside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once beenentertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have everbeen passionate, or expended time and zeal.

1871.

SANDRO BOTTICELLI

In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned byName--Sandro Botticelli. This pre-eminence may be due to chance only,but to some will rather appear a result of deliberate judgment; forpeople have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work, and hisname, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important.In the middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipated muchof that meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to thegreat imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religionwhich had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simplenaturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only,he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the modern world, thewritings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own ofclassical stories: or, if he painted religious incidents, painted themwith an under-current of original sentiment, which touches you as thereal matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible subject.What is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality ofpleasure, which his work has the property of exciting in us, and whichwe cannot get elsewhere? For this, especially when he has to speak of acomparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question which acritic has to answer.

In an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life isalmost colourless. Criticism indeed has cleared away much of the gossipwhich Vasari accumulated, has touched the legend of Lippo and Lucrezia,and rehabilitated the character of Andrea del Castagno; but inBotticelli's case there is no legend to dissipate. He did not even go byhis true name: Sandro is a nickname, and his true name is Filipepi,Botticelli being only the name of the goldsmith who first taught himart. Only two things happened to him, two things which he shared withother artists:--he was invited to Rome to paint in the Sistine Chapel,and he fell in later life under the influence of Savonarola, passingapparently almost out of men's sight in a sort of religious melancholy,which lasted till his death in 1515, according to the received date.Vasari says that he plunged into the study of Dante, and even wrote acomment on the Divine Comedy. But it seems strange that he should havelived on inactive so long; and one almost wishes that some documentmight come to light, which, fixing the date of his death earlier, mightrelieve one, in thinking of him, of his dejected old age.

He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of storyand sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of lineand colour, the medium of abstract painting. So he becomes theillustrator of Dante. In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481, theblank spaces, left at the beginning of every canto for the hand of theilluminator, have been filled, as far as the nineteenth canto of theInferno, with impressions of engraved plates, seemingly by way ofexperiment, for in the copy in the Bodleian Library, one of the threeimpressions it contains has been printed upside down, and much awry, inthe midst of the luxurious printed page. Giotto, and the followers ofGiotto, with their almost childish religious aim, had not learned to putthat weight of meaning into outward things, light, colour, everydaygesture, which the poetry of the Divine Comedy involves, and before thefifteenth century Dante could hardly have found an illustrator.Botticelli's illustrations are crowded with incident, blending, with anaive carelessness of pictorial propriety, three phases of the samescene into one plate. The grotesques, so often a stumbling-block topainters who forget that the words of a poet, which only feebly presentan image to the mind, must be lowered in key when translated into form,make one regret that he has not rather chosen for illustration the moresubdued imagery of the Purgatorio. Yet in the scene of those who "godown quick into hell," there is an invention about the fire taking holdon the upturned soles of the feet, which proves that the design is nomere translation of Dante's words, but a true painter's vision; whilethe scene of the Centaurs wins one at once, for, forgetful of the actualcircumstances of their appearance, Botticelli has gone off with delighton the thought of the Centaurs themselves, bright, small creatures ofthe woodland, with arch baby face and mignon forms, drawing tiny bows.

Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he might have beena mere naturalist among them. There are traces enough in his work ofthat alert sense of outward things, which, in the pictures of thatperiod, fills the lawns with delicate living creatures, and thehillsides with pools of water, and the pools of water with floweringreeds. But this was not enough for him; he is a visionary painter, andin his visionariness he resembles Dante. Giotto, the tried companion ofDante, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo even, do but transcribe, with more or lessrefining, the outward image; they are dramatic, not visionary painters;they are almost impassive spectators of the action before them. But thegenius of which Botticelli is the type usurps the data before it as theexponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own; in this interest it playsfast and loose with those data, rejecting some and isolating others, andalways combining them anew. To him as to Dante, the scene, the colour,the outward image or gesture, comes with all its incisive andimportunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by some subtle law ofhis own structure, a mood which it awakes in no one else, of which it isthe double or repetition, and which it clothes, that all may share it,with sensuous circumstance.

But he is far enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of Dantewhich, referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory,heaven and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths ofDante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor,Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting someshadow of ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo Palmieri--two dim figuresmove under that name in contemporary history--was the reputed author ofa poem, still unedited, La Citta Divina, which represented the humanrace as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of Lucifer,were neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of that earlierAlexandrian philosophy about which the Florentine intellect in thatcentury was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been only one ofthose familiar compositions in which religious reverie has recorded itsimpressions of the various forms of beatified existence--Glorias, asthey were called, like that in which Giotto painted the portrait ofDante; but somehow it was suspected of embodying in a picture thewayward dream of Palmieri, and the chapel where it hung was closed.Artists so entire as Botticelli are usually careless about philosophicaltheories, even when the philosopher is a Florentine of the fifteenthcentury, and his work a poem in terza rima. But Botticelli, who wrote acommentary on Dante, and became the disciple of Savonarola, may wellhave let such theories come and go across him. True or false, the storyinterprets much of the peculiar sentiment with which he infuses hisprofane and sacred persons, comely, and in a certain sense like angels,but with a sense of displacement or loss about them--the wistfulness ofexiles, conscious of a passion and energy greater than any known issueof them explains, which runs through all his varied work with asentiment of ineffable melancholy.

So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell,Botticelli accepts, that middle world in which men take no side in greatconflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals. He thussets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moralambition, does its most sincere and surest work. His interest is neitherin the untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the untempered evilof Orcagna's Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed anduncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passionwith a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually bythe shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink. Hismorality is all sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into hiswork somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity,which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist.

It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique expression andcharm. He has worked out in them a distinct and peculiar type, definiteenough in his own mind, for he has painted it over and over again,sometimes one might think almost mechanically, as a pastime during thatdark period when his thoughts were so heavy upon him. Hardly anycollection of note is without one of these circular pictures, into whichthe attendant angels depress their heads so naively. Perhaps you havesometimes wondered why those peevish-looking Madonnas, conformed to noacknowledged or obvious type of beauty, attract you more and more, andoften come back to you when the Sistine Madonna and the Virgins of FraAngelico are forgotten. At first, contrasting them with those, you mayhave thought that there was something in them mean or abject even, forthe abstract lines of the face have little nobleness, and the colour iswan. For with Botticelli she too, though she holds in her hands the"Desire of all nations," is one of those who are neither for Jehovah norfor His enemies; and her choice is on her face. The white light on it iscast up hard and cheerless from below, as when snow lies upon theground, and the children look up with surprise at the strange whitenessof the ceiling. Her trouble is in the very caress of the mysteriouschild, whose gaze is always far from her, and who has already that sweetlook of devotion which men have never been able altogether to love, andwhich still makes the born saint an object almost of suspicion to hisearthly brethren. Once, indeed, he guides her hand to transcribe in abook the words of her exaltation, the Ave, and the Magnificat, and theGaude Maria, and the young angels, glad to rouse her for a moment fromHer dejection, are eager to hold the inkhorn and to support the book;but the pen almost drops from her hand, and the high cold words have nomeaning for her, and her true children are those others, among whom inher rude home, the intolerable honour came to her, with that look ofwistful inquiry on their irregular faces which you see in startledanimals--gipsy children, such as those who, in Apennine villages, stillhold out their long brown arms to beg of you, but on Sundays becomeenfants du choeur, with their thick black hair nicely combed, and fairwhite linen on their sunburnt throats.

What is strangest is that he carries this sentiment into classicalsubjects, its most complete expression being a picture in the Uffizii,of Venus rising from the sea, in which the grotesque emblems of themiddle age, and a landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even itsstrange draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaintconceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultlessnude studies of Ingres. At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by aquaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever youhave read of Florence in the fifteenth century; afterwards you may thinkthat this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that thecolour is cadaverous or at least cold. And yet, the more you come tounderstand what imaginative colouring really is, that all colour is nomere delightful quality of natural things, but a spirit upon them bywhich they become expressive to the spirit, the better you will likethis peculiar quality of colour; and you will find that quaint design ofBotticelli's a more direct inlet into the Greek temper than the works ofthe Greeks themselves even of the finest period. Of the Greeks as theyreally were, of their difference from ourselves, of the aspects of theiroutward life, we know far more than Botticelli, or his most learnedcontemporaries; but for us long familiarity has taken off the edge ofthe lesson, and we are hardly conscious of what we owe to the Hellenicspirit. But in pictures like this of Botticelli's you have a record ofthe first impression made by it on minds turned back towards it, inalmost painful aspiration, from a world in which it had been ignored solong; and in the passion, the energy, the industry of realisation, withwhich Botticelli carries out his intention, is the exact measure of thelegitimate influence over the human mind of the imaginative system ofwhich this is the central myth. The light is indeed cold--mere sunlessdawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and youcan see the better for that quietness in the morning air each longpromontory, as it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth to theirlabours until the evening; but she is awake before them, and you mightthink that the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole longday of love yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows hardacross the grey water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on whichshe sails, the sea "showing his teeth" as it moves in thin lines offoam, and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe inoutline, plucked off short at the stalk but embrowned a little, asBotticelli's flowers always are. Botticelli meant all that imagery to bealtogether pleasurable; and it was partly an incompleteness ofresources, inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued andchilled it; but his predilection for minor tones counts also; and whatis unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the goddessof pleasure, as the depositary of a great power over the lives of men.

I have said that the peculiar character of Botticelli is the result of ablending in him of a sympathy for humanity in its uncertain condition,its attractiveness, its investiture at rarer moments in a character ofloveliness and energy, with his consciousness of the shadow upon it ofthe great things from which it shrinks, and that this conveys into hiswork somewhat more than painting usually attains of the true complexionof humanity. He paints the story of the goddess of pleasure in otherepisodes besides that of her birth from the sea, but never without someshadow of death in the grey flesh and wan flowers. He paints Madonnas,but they shrink from the pressure of the divine child, and plead inunmistakable undertones for a warmer, lower humanity. The samefigure--tradition connects it with Simonetta, the Mistress of Giulianode' Medici--appears again as Judith, returning home across the hillcountry, when the great deed is over, and the moment of revulsion come,when the olive branch in her hand is becoming a burthen; as Justice,sitting on a throne, but with a fixed look of self-hatred which makesthe sword in her hand seem that of a suicide; and again as Veritas, inthe allegorical picture of Calumnia, where one may note in passing thesuggestiveness of an accident which identifies the image of Truth withthe person of Venus. We might trace the same sentiment through hisengravings; but his share in them is doubtful, and the object of thisbrief study has been attained, if I have defined aright the temper inwhich he worked.

But, after all, it may be asked, is a painter like Botticelli--asecondary painter--a proper subject for general criticism? There are afew great painters, like Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose work has becomea force in general culture, partly for this very reason that they haveabsorbed into themselves all such workmen as Sandro Botticelli; and,over and above mere technical or antiquarian criticism, generalcriticism may be very well employed in that sort of interpretation whichadjusts the position of these men to general culture, whereas smallermen can be the proper subjects only of technical or antiquariantreatment. But, besides those great men, there is a certain number ofartists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey tous a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; andthese, too, have their place in general culture, and must be interpretedto it by those who have felt their charm strongly, and are often theobjects of a special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate,just because there is not about them the stress of a great name andauthority. Of this select number Botticelli is one; he has thefreshness, the uncertain and diffident promise which belongs to theearlier Renaissance itself, and makes it perhaps the most interestingperiod in the history of the mind: in studying his work one begins tounderstand to how great a place in human culture the art of Italy hadbeen called.

1870.

LUCA DELLA ROBBIA

The Italian sculptors of the earlier half of the fifteenth century aremore than mere forerunners of the great masters of its close, and oftenreach perfection, within the narrow limits which they chose to impose ontheir work. Their sculpture shares with the paintings of Botticelli andthe churches of Brunelleschi that profound expressiveness, that intimateimpress of an indwelling soul, which is the peculiar fascination of theart of Italy in that century. Their works have been much neglected, andoften almost hidden away amid the frippery of modern decoration, and wecome with some surprise on the places where their fire still smoulders.One longs to penetrate into the lives of the men who have givenexpression to so much power and sweetness; but it is part of thereserve, the austere dignity and simplicity of their existence, thattheir histories are for the most part lost, or told but briefly. Fromtheir lives, as from their work, all tumult of sound and colour haspassed away. Mino, the Raffaelle of sculpture, Maso del Rodario, whoseworks add a new grace to the church of Como, Donatello even--one asks invain for more than a shadowy outline of their actual days.

Something more remains of Luca della Robbia; something more of ahistory, of outward changes and fortunes, is expressed through his work.I suppose nothing brings the real air of a Tuscan town so vividly tomind as those pieces of pale blue and white earthenware, by which he isbest known, like fragments of the milky sky itself, fallen into the coolstreets, and breaking into the darkened churches. And no work is lessimitable; like Tuscan wine, it loses its savour when moved from itsbirthplace, from the crumbling walls where it was first placed. Part ofthe charm of this work, its grace and purity and finish of expression,is common to all the Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century; for Lucawas first of all a worker in marble, and his works in earthenware onlytransfer to a different material the principles of his sculpture.

These Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century worked for the most partin low relief, giving even to their monumental effigies something of itsdepression of surface, getting into them by this means a patheticsuggestion of the wasting and etherealisation of death. They are hatersof all heaviness and emphasis, of strongly-opposed light and shade, andseek their means of expression among those last refinements of shadow,which are almost invisible except in a strong light, and which thefinest pencil can hardly follow. The whole essence of their work isEXPRESSION, the passing of a smile over the face of a child, the rippleof the air on a still day over the curtain of a window ajar.

What is the precise value of this system of sculpture, this low relief?Luca della Robbia, and the other sculptors of the school to which hebelongs, have before them the universal problem of their art; and thissystem of low relief is the means by which they meet and overcome thespecial limitation of sculpture--a limitation resulting from thematerial and the essential conditions of all sculptured work, and whichconsists in the tendency of this work to a hard realism, a one-sidedpresentment of mere form, that solid material frame which only motioncan relieve, a thing of heavy shadows, and an individuality ofexpression pushed to caricature. Against this tendency to the hardpresentment of mere form trying vainly to compete with the reality ofnature itself, all noble sculpture constantly struggles: each greatsystem of sculpture resisting it in its own way, etherealising,spiritualising, relieving its hardness, its heaviness and death. The useof colour in sculpture is but an unskilful contrivance to effect, byborrowing from another art, what the nobler sculpture effects bystrictly appropriate means. To get not colour, but the equivalent ofcolour; to secure the expression and the play of life; to expand the toofixed individuality of pure, unrelieved, uncoloured form--this is theproblem which the three great styles in sculpture have solved in threedifferent ways.

Allgemeinheit--breadth, generality, universality--is the word chosen byWinckelmann, and after him by Goethe and many German critics, to expressthat law of the most excellent Greek sculptors, of Pheidias and hispupils, which prompted them constantly to seek the type in theindividual, to abstract and express only what is structural andpermanent, to purge from the individual all that belongs only to him,all the accidents, the feelings, and actions of the special moment, allthat (because in its own nature it endures but for a moment) is apt tolook like a frozen thing if one arrests it.

In this way their works came to be like some subtle extract or essence,or almost like pure thoughts or ideas: and hence the breadth of humanityin them, that detachment from the conditions of a particular place orpeople, which has carried their influence far beyond the age whichproduced them, and insured them universal acceptance.

That was the Greek way of relieving the hardness and unspirituality ofpure form. But it involved to a certain degree the sacrifice of what wecall expression; and a system of abstraction which aimed always at thebroad and general type, at the purging away from the individual of whatbelonged only to him, and of the mere accidents of a particular timeand place, imposed upon the range of effects open to the Greek sculptorlimits somewhat narrowly defined; and when Michelangelo came, with agenius spiritualised by the reverie of the middle age, penetrated by itsspirit of inwardness and introspection, living not a mere outward lifelike the Greek, but a life full of inward experiences, sorrows,consolations, a system which sacrificed so much of what was inward andunseen could not satisfy him. To him, lover and student of Greeksculpture as he was, work which did not bring what was inward to thesurface, which was not concerned with individual expression, withindividual character and feeling, the special history of the specialsoul, was not worth doing at all.

And so, in a way quite personal and peculiar to himself, which often is,and always seems, the effect of accident, he secured for his workindividuality and intensity of expression, while he avoided a too hardrealism, that tendency to harden into caricature which therepresentation of feeling in sculpture must always have. What time andaccident, its centuries of darkness under the furrows of the "littleMelian farm," have done with singular felicity of touch for the Venus ofMelos, fraying its surface and softening its lines, so that some spiritin the thing seems always on the point of breaking out, as though in itclassical sculpture had advanced already one step into the mysticalChristian age, its expression being in the whole range of ancient workmost like that of Michelangelo's own:--this effect Michelangelo gains byleaving nearly all his sculpture in a puzzling sort of incompleteness,which suggests rather than realises actual form. Something of thewasting of that snow-image which he moulded at the command of Piero de'Medici, when the snow lay one night in the court of the Pitti palace,almost always lurks about it, as if he had determined to make thequality of a task, exacted from him half in derision, the pride of allhis work. Many have wondered at that incompleteness, suspecting,however, that Michelangelo himself loved and was loath to change it, andfeeling at the same time that they too would lose something if thehalf-realised form ever quite emerged from the stone, so rough hewnhere, so delicately finished there; and they have wished to fathom thecharm of this incompleteness. Well! that incompleteness isMichelangelo's equivalent for colour in sculpture; it is his way ofetherealising pure form, of relieving its hard realism, andcommunicating to it breath, pulsation, the effect of life. It was acharacteristic too which fell in with his peculiar temper and mode oflife, his disappointments and hesitations. And it was in reality perfectfinish. In this way he combines the utmost amount of passion andintensity with the sense of a yielding and flexible life: he gets notvitality merely, but a wonderful force of expression.

Midway between these two systems--the system of the Greek sculptors andthe system of Michelangelo--comes the system of Luca della Robbia. Andthe other Tuscan sculptors of the fifteenth century, partaking both ofthe Allgemeinheit of the Greeks, their way of extracting certain selectelements only of pure form and sacrificing all the rest, and the studiedincompleteness of Michelangelo, relieving that expression of intensity,passion, energy, which might otherwise have hardened into caricature.Like Michelangelo, these sculptors fill their works with intense andindividualised expression: their noblest works are the studiedsepulchral portraits of particular persons--the monument of Conte Ugo inthe Badia of Florence, of the youthful Medea Colleoni, with thewonderful, long throat, in the chapel on the cool north side of theChurch of Santa Maria Maggiore at Bergamo--monuments which abound in thechurches of Rome, inexhaustible in suggestions of repose, of a subduedSabbatic joy, a kind of sacred grace and refinement:--and they unitethese elements of tranquillity, of repose, to that intense andindividual expression by a system of conventionalism as skilful andsubtle as that of the Greeks, subduing all such curves as indicate solidform, and throwing the whole into lower relief.

The life of Luca, a life of labour and frugality, with no adventure andno excitement except what belongs to the trial of new artisticprocesses, the struggle with new artistic difficulties, the solution ofpurely artistic problems, fills the first seventy years of the fifteenthcentury. After producing many works in marble for the Duomo and theCampanile of Florence, which place him among the foremost sculptors ofthat age, he became desirous to realise the spirit and manner of thatsculpture, in a humbler material, to unite its science, its exquisiteand expressive system of low relief, to the homely art of pottery, tointroduce those high qualities into common things, to adorn andcultivate daily household life. In this he is profoundly characteristicof the Florence of that century, of that in it which lay below itssuperficial vanity and caprice, a certain old-world modesty andseriousness and simplicity. People had not yet begun to think that whatwas good art for churches was not so good, or less fitted, for their ownhouses. Luca's new work was in plain white earthenware at first, a mererough imitation of the costly, laboriously wrought marble, finished in afew hours. But on this humble path he found his way to a fresh success,to another artistic grace. The fame of the oriental pottery, with itsstrange, bright colours--colours of art, colours not to be attained inthe natural stone--mingled with the tradition of the old Roman potteryof the neighbourhood. The little red, coral-like jars of Arezzo, dug upin that district from time to time, are still famous. These colourshaunted Luca's fancy. "He still continued seeking something more," hisbiographer says of him; "and instead of making his figures of bakedearth simply white, he added the further invention of giving themcolour, to the astonishment and delight of all who beheld them"--Cosasingolare, e multo utile per la state!--a curious thing, and very usefulfor summertime, full of coolness and repose for hand and eye. Luca lovedthe forms of various fruits, and wrought them into all sorts ofmarvellous frames and garlands, giving them their natural colours, onlysubdued a little, a little paler than nature. But in his noblerterra-cotta work he never introduces colour into the flesh, keepingmostly to blue and white, the colours of the Virgin Mary.

I said that the work of Luca della Robbia possessed in an unusualmeasure that special characteristic which belongs to all the workmen ofhis school, a characteristic which, even in the absence of much positiveinformation about their actual history, seems to bring those workmenthemselves very near to us--the impress of a personal quality, aprofound expressiveness, what the French call intimite, by which ismeant some subtler sense of originality--the seal on a man's work ofwhat is most inward and peculiar in his moods, and manner ofapprehension: it is what we call expression, carried to its highestintensity of degree. That characteristic is rare in poetry, rarer stillin art, rarest of all in the abstract art of sculpture; yet essentially,perhaps, it is the quality which alone makes works in the imaginativeand moral order really worth having at all. It is because the works ofthe artists of the fifteenth century possess this quality in anunmistakable way that one is anxious to know all that can be known aboutthem, and explain to oneself the secret of their charm.

1872.

THE POETRY OF MICHELANGELO

Critics of Michelangelo have sometimes spoken as if the onlycharacteristic of his genius were a wonderful strength, verging, as inthe things of the imagination great strength always does, on what issingular or strange. A certain strangeness, something of the blossomingof the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art; that theyshall excite or surprise us is indispensable. But that they shall givepleasure and exert a charm over us is indispensable too; and thisstrangeness must be sweet also--a lovely strangeness. And to the trueadmirers of Michelangelo this is the true type of theMichelangelesque--sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise, anenergy of conception which seems at every moment about to break throughall the conditions of comely form, recovering, touch by touch, aloveliness found usually only in the simplest natural things--ex fortidulcedo.

In this way he sums up for them the whole character of medieval artitself in that which distinguishes it most clearly from classical work,the presence of a convulsive energy in it, becoming in lower handsmerely monstrous or forbidding, but felt, even in its most gracefulproducts, as a subdued quaintness or grotesque. Yet those who feel thisgrace or sweetness in Michelangelo might at the first moment be puzzledif they were asked wherein precisely the quality resided. Men ofinventive temperament--Victor Hugo, for instance, in whom, as inMichelangelo, people have for the most part been attracted or repelledby the strength, while few have understood his sweetness--have sometimesrelieved conceptions of merely moral or spiritual greatness, but withlittle aesthetic charm of their own, by lovely accidents or accessories,like the butterfly which alights on the blood-stained barricade in LesMiserables, or those sea-birds for which the monstrous Gilliatt comes tobe as some wild natural thing, so that they are no longer afraid of him,in Les Travailleurs de la Mer. But the austere genius of Michelangelowill not depend for its sweetness on any mere accessories like these.The world of natural things has almost no existence for him; "When onespeaks of him," says Grimm, "woods, clouds, seas, and mountainsdisappear, and only what is formed by the spirit of man remains behind";and he quotes a few slight words from a letter of his to Vasari as thesingle expression in all he has left of a feeling for nature. He hastraced no flowers, like those with which Leonardo stars over hisgloomiest rocks; nothing like the fretwork of wings and flames in whichBlake frames his most startling conceptions; no forest-scenery likeTitian's fills his backgrounds, but only blank ranges of rock, and dimvegetable forms as blank as they, as in a world before the creation ofthe first five days.

Of the whole story of the creation he has painted only the creation ofthe first man and woman, and, for him at least, feebly, the creation oflight. It belongs to the quality of his genius thus to concern itselfalmost exclusively with the creation of man. For him it is not, as inthe story itself, the last and crowning act of a series of developments,but the first and unique act, the creation of life itself in its supremeform, off-hand and immediately, in the cold and lifeless stone. With himthe beginning of life has all the characteristics of resurrection; it islike the recovery of suspended health or animation, with its gratitude,its effusion, and eloquence. Fair as the young men of the Elgin marbles,the Adam of the Sistine Chapel is unlike them in a total absence of thatbalance and completeness which express so well the sentiment of aself-contained, independent life. In that languid figure there issomething rude and satyr-like, something akin to the rugged hillside onwhich it lies. His whole form is gathered into an expression of mereexpectation and reception; he has hardly strength enough to lift hisfinger to touch the finger of the creator; yet a touch of thefinger-tips will suffice.

This creation of life--life coming always as relief or recovery, andalways in strong contrast with the rough-hewn mass in which it iskindled--is in various ways the motive of all his work, whether itsimmediate subject be Pagan or Christian, legend or allegory; and this,although at least one-half of his work was designed for the adornment oftombs--the tomb of Julius, the tombs of the Medici. Not the Judgment butthe Resurrection is the real subject of his last work in the SistineChapel; and his favourite Pagan subject is the legend of Leda, thedelight of the world breaking from the egg of a bird. As I have alreadypointed out, he secures that ideality of expression which in Greeksculpture depends on a delicate system of abstraction, and in earlyItalian sculpture on lowness of relief, by an incompleteness, which issurely not always undesigned, and which I suppose no one regrets, andtrusts to the spectator to complete the half-emergent form. And as hispersons have something of the unwrought stone about them, so, as if torealise the expression by which the old Florentine records describe asculptor--master of live stone--with him the very rocks seem to havelife; they have but to cast away the dust and scurf that they may riseand stand on their feet. He loved the very quarries of Carrara, thosestrange grey peaks which even at mid-day convey into any scene fromwhich they are visible something of the solemnity and stillness ofevening, sometimes wandering among them month after month, till at lasttheir pale ashen colours seem to have passed into his painting; and onthe crown of the head of the David there still remains a morsel of uncutstone, as if by one touch to maintain its connexion with the place fromwhich it was hewn.

And it is in this penetrative suggestion of life that the secret of thatsweetness of his is to be found. He gives us indeed no lovely naturalobjects like Leonardo or Titian, but only the coldest, most elementaryshadowing of rock or tree; no lovely draperies and comely gestures oflife, but only the austere truths of human nature; "simple persons"--ashe replied in his rough way to the querulous criticism of Julius theSecond, that there was no gold on the figures of the SistineChapel--"simple persons, who wore no gold on their garments"; but hepenetrates us with a sense of that power which we associate with all thewarmth and fulness of the world, and the sense of which brings intoone's thoughts a swarm of birds and flowers and insects. The broodingspirit of life itself is there; and the summer may burst out in amoment.

He was born in an interval of a rapid midnight journey in March, at aplace in the neighbourhood of Arezzo, the thin, clear air of which, aswas then thought, being favourable to the birth of children of greatparts. He came of a race of grave and dignified men, who, claimingkinship with the family of Canossa, and some colour of imperial blood intheir veins, had, generation after generation, received honourableemployment under the government of Florence. His mother, a girl ofnineteen years, put him out to nurse at a country house among the hillsof Settignano, where every other inhabitant is a worker in the marblequarries, and the child early became familiar with that strange firststage in the sculptor's art. To this succeeded the influence of thesweetest and most placid master Florence had yet seen, DomenicoGhirlandajo. At fifteen he was at work among the curiosities of thegarden of the Medici, copying and restoring antiques, winning thecondescending notice of the great Lorenzo. He knew too how to excitestrong hatreds; and it was at this time that in a quarrel with afellow-student he received a blow on the face which deprived him forever of the comeliness of outward form. It was through an accident thathe came to study those works of the early Italian sculptors whichsuggested much of his own grandest work, and impressed it with so deep asweetness. He believed in dreams and omens. One of his friends dreamedtwice that Lorenzo, then lately dead, appeared to him in grey and dustyapparel. To Michelangelo this dream seemed to portend the troubles whichafterwards really came, and with the suddenness which was characteristicof all his movements, he left Florence. Having occasion to pass throughBologna, he neglected to procure the little seal of red wax which thestranger entering Bologna must carry on the thumb of his right hand. Hehad no money to pay the fine, and would have been thrown into prison hadnot one of the magistrates interposed. He remained in this man's house awhole year, rewarding his hospitality by readings from the Italian poetswhom he loved. Bologna, with its endless colonnades and fantasticleaning towers, can never have been one of the lovelier cities of Italy.But about the portals of its vast unfinished churches and its darkshrines, half hidden by votive flowers and candles, lie some of thesweetest works of the early Tuscan sculptors, Giovanni da Pisa andJacopo della Quercia, things as winsome as flowers; and the year whichMichelangelo spent in copying these works was not a lost year. It wasnow, on returning to Florence, that he put forth that unique presentmentof Bacchus, which expresses, not the mirthfulness of the god of wine,but his sleepy seriousness, his enthusiasm, his capacity for profounddreaming. No one ever expressed more truly than Michelangelo the notionof inspired sleep, of faces charged with dreams. A vast fragment ofmarble had long lain below the Loggia of Orcagna, and many a sculptorhad had his thoughts of a design which should just fill this famousblock of stone, cutting the diamond, as it were, without loss. UnderMichelangelo's hand it became the David which stood till lately on thesteps of the Palazzo Vecchio, when it was replaced below the Loggia.Michelangelo was now thirty years old, and his reputation wasestablished. Three great works fill the remainder of his life--threeworks often interrupted, carried on through a thousand hesitations, athousand disappointments, quarrels with his patrons, quarrels with hisfamily, quarrels perhaps most of all with himself--the Sistine Chapel,the Mausoleum of Julius the Second, and the Sacristy of San Lorenzo.

In the story of Michelangelo's life the strength, often turning tobitterness, is not far to seek; a discordant note sounds throughout itwhich almost spoils the music. He "treats the Pope as the King of Francehimself would not dare to treat him"; he goes along the streets of Rome"like an executioner," Raffaelle says of him. Once he seems to have shuthimself up with the intention of starving himself to death. As we comein reading his life on its harsh, untempered incidents, the thoughtagain and again arises that he is one of those who incur the judgment ofDante, as having "wilfully lived in sadness." Even his tenderness andpity are embittered by their strength. What passionate weeping in thatmysterious figure which, in the Creation of Adam, crouches below theimage of the Almighty, as he comes with the forms of things to be, womanand her progeny, in the fold of his garment! What a sense of wrong inthose two captive youths, who feel the chains like scalding water ontheir proud and delicate flesh! The idealist who became a reformer withSavonarola, and a republican superintending the fortification ofFlorence--the nest where he was born, il nido ove naqqu'io, as he callsit once, in a sudden throb of affection--in its last struggle forliberty, yet believed always that he had imperial blood in his veins andwas of the kindred of the great Matilda, had within the depths of hisnature some secret spring of indignation or sorrow. We know little ofhis youth, but all tends to make one believe in the vehemence of itspassions. Beneath the Platonic calm of the sonnets there is latent adeep delight in carnal form and colour. There, and still more in themadrigals, he often falls into the language of less tranquil affections;while some of them have the colour of penitence, as from a wandererreturning home. He who spoke so decisively of the supremacy in theimaginative world of the unveiled human form had not been always, we maythink, a mere Platonic lover. Vague and wayward his loves may have been;but they partook of the strength of his nature, and sometimes, it maybe, would by no means become music, so that the comely order of his dayswas quite put out: par che amaro ogni mio dolce io senta.

But his genius is in harmony with itself; and just as in the products ofhis art we find resources of sweetness within their exceeding strength,so in his own story also, bitter as the ordinary sense of it may be,there are select pages shut in among the rest--pages one might easilyturn over too lightly, but which yet sweeten the whole volume. Theinterest of Michelangelo's poems is that they make us spectators of thisstruggle; the struggle of a strong nature to adorn and attune itself;the struggle of a desolating passion, which yearns to be resigned andsweet and pensive, as Dante's was. It is a consequence of the occasionaland informal character of his poetry, that it brings us nearer tohimself, his own mind and temper, than any work done only to support aliterary reputation could possibly do. His letters tell us little thatis worth knowing about him--a few poor quarrels about money andcommissions. But it is quite otherwise with these songs and sonnets,written down at odd moments, sometimes on the margins of his sketches,themselves often unfinished sketches, arresting some salient feeling orunpremeditated idea as it passed. And it happens that a true study ofthese has become within the last few years for the first time possible.A few of the sonnets circulated widely in manuscript, and became almostwithin Michelangelo's own lifetime a subject of academical discourses.But they were first collected in a volume in 1623 by the great-nephew ofMichelangelo, Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger. He omitted much,re-wrote the sonnets in part, and sometimes compressed two or morecompositions into one, always losing something of the force andincisiveness of the original. So the book remained, neglected even byItalians themselves in the last century, through the influence of thatFrench taste which despised all compositions of the kind, as it despisedand neglected Dante. "His reputation will ever be on the increase,because he is so little read," says Voltaire of Dante.--But in 1858 thelast of the Buonarroti bequeathed to the municipality of Florence thecuriosities of his family. Among them was a precious volume containingthe autograph of the sonnets. A learned Italian, Signor Cesare Guasti,undertook to collate this autograph with other manuscripts at theVatican and elsewhere, and in 1863 published a true version ofMichelangelo's poems, with dissertations and a paraphrase.*

*The sonnets have been translated into English, with much poetic tasteand skill, by Mr. J. A. Symonds.

People have often spoken of these poems as if they were a mere cry ofdistress, a lover's complaint over the obduracy of Vittoria Colonna. Butthose who speak thus forget that though it is quite possible thatMichelangelo had seen Vittoria, that somewhat shadowy figure, as earlyas 1537, yet their closer intimacy did not begin till about the year1542, when Michelangelo was nearly seventy years old. Vittoria herself,an ardent neo-catholic, vowed to perpetual widowhood since the news hadreached her, seventeen years before, that her husband, the youthful andprincely Marquess of Pescara, lay dead of the wounds he had received inthe battle of Pavia, was then no longer an object of great passion. In adialogue written by the painter, Francesco d'Ollanda, we catch a glimpseof them together in an empty church at Rome, one Sunday afternoon,discussing indeed the characteristics of various schools of art, butstill more the writings of Saint Paul, already following the ways andtasting the sunless pleasures of weary people, whose hold on outwardthings is slackening. In a letter still extant he regrets that when hevisited her after death he had kissed her hands only. He made, or set towork to make, a crucifix for her use, and two drawings, perhaps inpreparation for it, are now in Oxford. From allusions in the sonnets, wemay divine that when they first approached each other he had debatedmuch with himself whether this last passion would be the mostunsoftening, the most desolating of all--un dolce amaro, un si e no mimuovi; is it carnal affection, or, del suo prestino stato (Plato'sante-natal state) il raggio ardente? The older, conventional criticism,